Print ArticleApparently my old article "The Death of Yahoo Chat", which discussed changes being implemented by Yahoo Corporation in 2005 that were designed to protect children from predators, still circulates in some corners of cyber space. Three or four months ago I received an email through my still active yahoo account inviting me to try a website that was attempting to recapture some of the finer aspects of yahoo chat. Having nearly abandoned yahoo chat shortly after the powers that be added a redundant login policy and eliminated end user ability to create private rooms; the invitation to join a discussion community caught my attention.
Over the years I´ve repeatedly tried real-time chat software solutions for my personal discussion site www.fedupwithpc.com, but I´ve never had much success with any free chat software solutions and no real budget for any of the commercial solutions. Any programs I chose either required a client side application to be installed or the user interface was archaic and clumsy or the features of the free application were limiting or entirely lacking, in any event the programs never worked out well enough to attract my website visitors into real-time chat sessions. Eventually I stopped trying to implement chat capability on fedupwithpc and put behind me the possibility of quickly amassing a broad range of varying opinions in real-time on the web; that is until I received this email from www.oohya.net.
Out of genuine curiosity I established an account on oohya.net and logged in to see if this enterprise managed to salvage any of the truly worthwhile aspects of Yahoo Chat. Despite perhaps a dozen or so logins at various hours of the day and night over a span of four months, I have to conclude that oohya.net is, in contrast to the lofty goals stated in the email sent to me, nothing more than a smaller scale porn oriented adult chat website that is, even now, nowhere near competitive with yahoo chat.
The format of the Oohya.net website consists of 50 rooms (one for each state), a fist full of private rooms, and a room dedicated to political discussion. Unfortunately, in my dozen or so logins I never saw anyone in any of those rooms regardless of the time of the day or night I logged in. Predictably, I always found people in two of the sites rooms: Adult Webcam and the Lobby. By far the Adult webcam room was always the most populated while the Lobby could be relied on for perhaps five to ten people chatting. As is the norm in the majority of smaller discussion websites, oohya.net is cliquish. Any attempt to converse beyond the initial greeting either went on deaf ears or faded altogether when anything of substance was offered as a topic. Predictably, those to be found in the adult webcam room were a bunch of grown adults using hundreds of dollars worth of hardware and software to explore their own flirtatious exhibitionism. Disappointed I decided to see what had become of yahoo chat.
It had been quite some time, perhaps three years, since I attempted to gather any points of view from Yahoo chat. Even back in 2005 the task of drawing well supported opinions from all across the United States, or across the globe, in yahoo chat was a tall order. But oohya.net piqued my interest to find out what had become of my old resource. I logged in under my old account and visited the political, religious, culture and computer areas. These days there are only generic main topic areas that contain twenty or thirty sub-chat rooms that are named by the system.
Sadly, Yahoo chat, the beast that should been put down 2005, has degraded far beyond anything I could have foresaw in my previous article. After witnessing the hoard of people and perverts converge into generic topic based community rooms in 2005, I assumed that the over protective yahoo corporation would, before too long, simply realize how licentious, vulgar, and meaningless its service had become and either shut itself down completely or morph into a pay to chat service. I was naively mistaken.
The first thing I encountered was the annoying double login process instituted in 2005 that was intended to protectively log everyone´s IP address and prevent automated services from flooding yahoo´s chat rooms with porn solicitations. On a positive note I´m pleased to say that the yahoo service does a fine job of logging IP addresses. But the double login is an absolute failure when it comes to stopping the automated "bots" from intruding into, and even entirely overtaking, chat rooms.
In yahoo chat these days the chat room topics are inconsequential. Talking about Christ or Vishnu in a religious room, provided you actually found people to chat with, is nearly impossible as literally dozens of the automatons consistently interrupt any real conversation with dozens of screen lines advertising xxx for-pay web camera services and websites. Worse still, these automatons bombarded me with near continuous private messages in attempt entice me to even more porn website and adult cameras on that bots profile page. Under these conditions it would have been nearly impossible to conduct any meaningful conversation for more than a few minutes in the chat room or in private had actual people been present. Ignoring these bots became a full time diversion which completely eliminated any possibility of conversation.
Switching to a new room only began the ignore process anew with different bots pitching similar x-rated content. Several rooms that claimed to have 30-50 people in them were populated entirely by these automated solicitation accounts. In a political chat room, I was privileged to witness a truly automated sexual encounter. One sex-bot solicited another sex-bot who in turn sought to convince any humans in the room to check a link in its profile to join both of them a good time. Naturally I had to wonder what the actual sex chat rooms must be like if the non-sex related rooms were so thoroughly populated by these phishing manifestations.
Heading into a straight sex adult room I was finally able to find people. Of the 36 listed in the room prior to entering, I found four human beings in competition with 32 randomly active bots. Amusingly these males, for even the one with a feminine name and profile eventually revealed that he was indeed a guy, did nothing but complain at the absence of females in yahoo chat and how bored they were. I left the room when the pretender (male posing as female) offered pictures of himself in female attire to a male who offered to expose himself on his web cam in return. Content in my summation of the current status of yahoo chat, I quit yahoo chat for good.
It´s truly sad to learn that there is nothing of value remaining on yahoo chat. There was a time when I was able to use the political, religious, or computer rooms of the service to, albeit with some difficulty, gain insight into what others thought regarding world events, socio-philosophy, and religious beliefs. Granted those views could get a bit off the wall but occasionally I could find one or two people who could express and support in detail viewpoints dissimilar or contrasting my own. The only voices remaining in Yahoo Chat today comes either from unabashed perverts seeking some form of sexual gratification or from self congratulating leftists working en mass to tailor reasonable auditory to justify their socialist and communist philosophies in direct contrast with their American heritage.
Perhaps an hour after exiting yahoo chat my yahoo mailbox was flooded with 39 spam emails and four emails that I later classified as spam. Apparently yahoo´s online bots capture ones email address to continue their solicitation more directly. I find it hard to believe that Yahoo Corporation doesn´t sanction these obnoxious and intrusive programs. It´s been several days since my visit to yahoo chat and its offshoot oohya.net. I´m still receiving dozens of spam solicitations every day. Yahoo Corporation should show some mercy and pull the plug on yahoo chat.
Over the years I´ve repeatedly tried real-time chat software solutions for my personal discussion site www.fedupwithpc.com, but I´ve never had much success with any free chat software solutions and no real budget for any of the commercial solutions. Any programs I chose either required a client side application to be installed or the user interface was archaic and clumsy or the features of the free application were limiting or entirely lacking, in any event the programs never worked out well enough to attract my website visitors into real-time chat sessions. Eventually I stopped trying to implement chat capability on fedupwithpc and put behind me the possibility of quickly amassing a broad range of varying opinions in real-time on the web; that is until I received this email from www.oohya.net.
Out of genuine curiosity I established an account on oohya.net and logged in to see if this enterprise managed to salvage any of the truly worthwhile aspects of Yahoo Chat. Despite perhaps a dozen or so logins at various hours of the day and night over a span of four months, I have to conclude that oohya.net is, in contrast to the lofty goals stated in the email sent to me, nothing more than a smaller scale porn oriented adult chat website that is, even now, nowhere near competitive with yahoo chat.
The format of the Oohya.net website consists of 50 rooms (one for each state), a fist full of private rooms, and a room dedicated to political discussion. Unfortunately, in my dozen or so logins I never saw anyone in any of those rooms regardless of the time of the day or night I logged in. Predictably, I always found people in two of the sites rooms: Adult Webcam and the Lobby. By far the Adult webcam room was always the most populated while the Lobby could be relied on for perhaps five to ten people chatting. As is the norm in the majority of smaller discussion websites, oohya.net is cliquish. Any attempt to converse beyond the initial greeting either went on deaf ears or faded altogether when anything of substance was offered as a topic. Predictably, those to be found in the adult webcam room were a bunch of grown adults using hundreds of dollars worth of hardware and software to explore their own flirtatious exhibitionism. Disappointed I decided to see what had become of yahoo chat.
It had been quite some time, perhaps three years, since I attempted to gather any points of view from Yahoo chat. Even back in 2005 the task of drawing well supported opinions from all across the United States, or across the globe, in yahoo chat was a tall order. But oohya.net piqued my interest to find out what had become of my old resource. I logged in under my old account and visited the political, religious, culture and computer areas. These days there are only generic main topic areas that contain twenty or thirty sub-chat rooms that are named by the system.
Sadly, Yahoo chat, the beast that should been put down 2005, has degraded far beyond anything I could have foresaw in my previous article. After witnessing the hoard of people and perverts converge into generic topic based community rooms in 2005, I assumed that the over protective yahoo corporation would, before too long, simply realize how licentious, vulgar, and meaningless its service had become and either shut itself down completely or morph into a pay to chat service. I was naively mistaken.
The first thing I encountered was the annoying double login process instituted in 2005 that was intended to protectively log everyone´s IP address and prevent automated services from flooding yahoo´s chat rooms with porn solicitations. On a positive note I´m pleased to say that the yahoo service does a fine job of logging IP addresses. But the double login is an absolute failure when it comes to stopping the automated "bots" from intruding into, and even entirely overtaking, chat rooms.
In yahoo chat these days the chat room topics are inconsequential. Talking about Christ or Vishnu in a religious room, provided you actually found people to chat with, is nearly impossible as literally dozens of the automatons consistently interrupt any real conversation with dozens of screen lines advertising xxx for-pay web camera services and websites. Worse still, these automatons bombarded me with near continuous private messages in attempt entice me to even more porn website and adult cameras on that bots profile page. Under these conditions it would have been nearly impossible to conduct any meaningful conversation for more than a few minutes in the chat room or in private had actual people been present. Ignoring these bots became a full time diversion which completely eliminated any possibility of conversation.
Switching to a new room only began the ignore process anew with different bots pitching similar x-rated content. Several rooms that claimed to have 30-50 people in them were populated entirely by these automated solicitation accounts. In a political chat room, I was privileged to witness a truly automated sexual encounter. One sex-bot solicited another sex-bot who in turn sought to convince any humans in the room to check a link in its profile to join both of them a good time. Naturally I had to wonder what the actual sex chat rooms must be like if the non-sex related rooms were so thoroughly populated by these phishing manifestations.
Heading into a straight sex adult room I was finally able to find people. Of the 36 listed in the room prior to entering, I found four human beings in competition with 32 randomly active bots. Amusingly these males, for even the one with a feminine name and profile eventually revealed that he was indeed a guy, did nothing but complain at the absence of females in yahoo chat and how bored they were. I left the room when the pretender (male posing as female) offered pictures of himself in female attire to a male who offered to expose himself on his web cam in return. Content in my summation of the current status of yahoo chat, I quit yahoo chat for good.
It´s truly sad to learn that there is nothing of value remaining on yahoo chat. There was a time when I was able to use the political, religious, or computer rooms of the service to, albeit with some difficulty, gain insight into what others thought regarding world events, socio-philosophy, and religious beliefs. Granted those views could get a bit off the wall but occasionally I could find one or two people who could express and support in detail viewpoints dissimilar or contrasting my own. The only voices remaining in Yahoo Chat today comes either from unabashed perverts seeking some form of sexual gratification or from self congratulating leftists working en mass to tailor reasonable auditory to justify their socialist and communist philosophies in direct contrast with their American heritage.
Perhaps an hour after exiting yahoo chat my yahoo mailbox was flooded with 39 spam emails and four emails that I later classified as spam. Apparently yahoo´s online bots capture ones email address to continue their solicitation more directly. I find it hard to believe that Yahoo Corporation doesn´t sanction these obnoxious and intrusive programs. It´s been several days since my visit to yahoo chat and its offshoot oohya.net. I´m still receiving dozens of spam solicitations every day. Yahoo Corporation should show some mercy and pull the plug on yahoo chat.
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